Effort Estimation Using Social Choice

In this chapter, we argue for adopting mechanisms from the field of social choice for effort estimation. Social choice deals with aggregating the preferences of a number of individuals into a single ranking. We will use this idea, substituting these voters by different project attributes. Therefore a new project only needs to be placed into rankings per attribute, necessitating only ordinal values. Using the resulting aggregate ranking, the new project is again placed between other projects, whose actual expended effort can be used to derive an estimation. In this chapter, we will present this method together with a sample application and validation based on the well-known COCOMO 81 data set.

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